OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
DISTINGUISH Workflow: A New Paradigm of Dynamic Well Placement Using Generative Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The real-time process of directional changes while drilling, known as geosteering, is crucial for hydrocarbon extraction and emerging directional drilling applications such as geothermal energy, civil infrastructure, and CO2 storage. The geo-energy industry seeks an automatic geosteering workflow that continually updates the subsurface uncertainties and captures the latest geological understanding given the most recent observations in real-time. We propose "DISTINGUISH": a real-time, AI-driven workflow designed to transform geosteering by integrating Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for geological parameterization, ensemble methods for model updating, and global discrete dynamic programming (DDP) optimization for complex decision-making during directional drilling operations. The DISTINGUISH framework relies on offline training of a GAN model to reproduce relevant geology realizations and a Forward Neural Network (FNN) to model Logging-While-Drilling (LWD) tools' response for a given geomodel. This paper introduces a first-of-its-kind workflow that progressively reduces GAN-geomodel uncertainty around and ahead of the drilling bit and adjusts the well plan accordingly. The workflow automatically integrates real-time LWD data with a DDP-based decision support system, enhancing predictive models of geology ahead of drilling and leading to better steering decisions. We present a simple yet representative benchmark case and document the performance target achieved by the DISTINGUISH workflow prototype. This benchmark will be a foundation for future methodological advancements and workflow refinements.
ESPnet-SDS: Unified Toolkit and Demo for Spoken Dialogue Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Advancements in audio foundation models (FMs) have fueled interest in end-to-end (E2E) spoken dialogue systems, but different web interfaces for each system makes it challenging to compare and contrast them effectively. Motivated by this, we introduce an open-source, user-friendly toolkit designed to build unified web interfaces for various cascaded and E2E spoken dialogue systems. Our demo further provides users with the option to get on-the-fly automated evaluation metrics such as (1) latency, (2) ability to understand user input, (3) coherence, diversity, and relevance of system response, and (4) intelligibility and audio quality of system output. Using the evaluation metrics, we compare various cascaded and E2E spoken dialogue systems with a human-human conversation dataset as a proxy. Our analysis demonstrates that the toolkit allows researchers to effortlessly compare and contrast different technologies, providing valuable insights such as current E2E systems having poorer audio quality and less diverse responses. An example demo produced using our toolkit is publicly available here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Siddhant/Voice_Assistant_Demo.
CLEV: LLM-Based Evaluation Through Lightweight Efficient Voting for Free-Form Question-Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Evaluating free-form Question Answering (QA) remains a challenge due to its diverse and open-ended nature. Traditional automatic metrics fail to capture semantic equivalence or accommodate the variability of open-ended responses. Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as evaluators offers a promising alternative due to their strong language understanding and instruction-following capabilities. We propose Consensus via Lightweight Efficient Voting (CLEV), which employs two primary LLMs as judges and invokes a third judge only in cases of disagreement. This approach prioritizes evaluation reliability while reducing unnecessary computational demands. Through experiments, including human evaluation, we demonstrate CLEV's ability to provide consistent, scalable, and resource-efficient assessments, establishing it as a robust framework for evaluating LLMs on free-form QA.
Can Non-Signaling Assistance Increase the Degrees of Freedom of a Wireless Network?
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

An open question posed by Fawzi and Ferme [Transactions on Information Theory 2024], asks whether non-signaling (NS) assistance can increase the capacity of a broadcast channel (BC). We answer this question in the affirmative, by showing that for a certain K-receiver BC setting, called Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) that arises naturally in wireless networks, NS-assistance provides multiplicative gains in capacity and degrees of freedom (DoF), even achieving K-fold improvements in some cases. Somewhat surprisingly, this is shown to be true even for 2-receiver broadcast channels that are semi-deterministic and/or degraded. In a CoMP BC, B single-antenna transmitters, supported by a backhaul that allows them to share data, act as one B-antenna transmitter, to send independent messages to K receivers, each equipped with a single receive antenna. A fixed and globally known connectivity matrix M, specifies for each transmit antenna, the subset of receivers that are connected to (have a non-zero channel coefficient to) that antenna. Besides the connectivity, there is no channel state information at the transmitter. The DoF region is fully characterized for a class of connectivity patterns associated with tree graphs. Sum-capacity with NS-assistance for arbitrary connectivity patterns is bounded below and above by the triangle number and the min-rank of the connectivity matrix, respectively. While translations to Gaussian settings are demonstrated, most of our results are presented under noise-free, finite-field (Fq) models. Converse proofs for classical DoF adapt the Aligned Images bounds to the finite field model. Converse bounds for NS-assisted capacity extend the same-marginals property to the BC with NS-assistance available to all parties. Even stronger (unbounded) gains are established for certain 'communication with side-information' settings, such as the fading dirty paper channel.
A Comprehensive Experimentation Framework for Energy-Efficient Design of Cloud-Native Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Current approaches to designing energy-efficient applications typically rely on measuring individual components using readily available local metrics, like CPU utilization. However, these metrics fall short when applied to cloud-native applications, which operate within the multi-tenant, shared environments of distributed cloud providers. Assessing and optimizing the energy efficiency of cloud-native applications requires consideration of the complex, layered nature of modern cloud stacks. To address this need, we present a comprehensive, automated, and extensible experimentation framework that enables developers to measure energy efficiency across all relevant layers of a cloud-based application and evaluate associated quality trade-offs. Our framework integrates a suite of service quality and sustainability metrics, providing compatibility with any Kubernetes-based application. We demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach through initial experimental results, comparing architectural design alternatives for a widely used open-source cloud-native application.
Randomness, Not Representation: The Unreliability of Evaluating Cultural Alignment in LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2025
Year: 2025

Research on the 'cultural alignment' of Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged in response to growing interest in understanding representation across diverse stakeholders. Current approaches to evaluating cultural alignment through survey-based assessments that borrow from social science methodologies often overlook systematic robustness checks. Here, we identify and test three assumptions behind current survey-based evaluation methods: (1) Stability: that cultural alignment is a property of LLMs rather than an artifact of evaluation design, (2) Extrapolability: that alignment with one culture on a narrow set of issues predicts alignment with that culture on others, and (3) Steerability: that LLMs can be reliably prompted to represent specific cultural perspectives. Through experiments examining both explicit and implicit preferences of leading LLMs, we find a high level of instability across presentation formats, incoherence between evaluated versus held-out cultural dimensions, and erratic behavior under prompt steering. We show that these inconsistencies can cause the results of an evaluation to be very sensitive to minor variations in methodology. Finally, we demonstrate in a case study on evaluation design that narrow experiments and a selective assessment of evidence can be used to paint an incomplete picture of LLMs' cultural alignment properties. Overall, these results highlight significant limitations of current survey-based approaches to evaluating the cultural alignment of LLMs and highlight a need for systematic robustness checks and red-teaming for evaluation results. Data and code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/akhan02/cultural-dimension-cover-letters and https://github.com/ariba-k/llm-cultural-alignment-evaluation, respectively.
Blockchain As a Platform For Artificial Intelligence (AI) Transparency
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly complex and autonomous, concerns over transparency and accountability have intensified. The "black box" problem in AI decision-making limits stakeholders' ability to understand, trust, and verify outcomes, particularly in high-stakes sectors such as healthcare, finance, and autonomous systems. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized, immutable, and transparent characteristics, presents a potential solution to enhance AI transparency and auditability. This paper explores the integration of blockchain with AI to improve decision traceability, data provenance, and model accountability. By leveraging blockchain as an immutable record-keeping system, AI decision-making can become more interpretable, fostering trust among users and regulatory compliance. However, challenges such as scalability, integration complexity, and computational overhead must be addressed to fully realize this synergy. This study discusses existing research, proposes a framework for blockchain-enhanced AI transparency, and highlights practical applications, benefits, and limitations. The findings suggest that blockchain could be a foundational technology for ensuring AI systems remain accountable, ethical, and aligned with regulatory standards.
A Recipe for Improving Remote Sensing VLM Zero Shot Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Foundation models have had a significant impact across various AI applications, enabling use cases that were previously impossible. Contrastive Visual Language Models (VLMs), in particular, have outperformed other techniques in many tasks. However, their prevalence in remote sensing (RS) is still limited, due to the scarcity of diverse remote-sensing visual-language datasets. In this work we introduce two novel image-caption datasets for training of remote sensing foundation models. The first dataset pairs aerial and satellite imagery with captions generated by Gemini using landmarks extracted from Google Maps. The second dataset utilizes public web images and their corresponding alt-text, filtered for the remote sensing domain, resulting in a diverse dataset with greater breadth in image styles and subject matter. These datasets are used to pre-train the MaMMUT~\citep{kuo2023mammutsimplearchitecturejoint} VLM architecture, resulting in state-of-the-art generalization performance in zero-shot cross-modal retrieval on well-known public benchmarks. Finally, we present our ongoing research to distill image-level knowledge gained in the VLM contrastive training procedure to enhance the model's localization ability. Specifically, we iteratively generate pseudo-labels for image regions based on the model's attention maps and use these labels for further training. To mitigate noisy attention maps and create robust segmentation masks, we introduce a novel attention-pooling mechanism called the Smooth-Attention-Operation.
Enhancing Traffic Signal Control through Model-based Reinforcement Learning and Policy Reuse
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2025
Year: 2025

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown significant potential in traffic signal control (TSC). However, current MARL-based methods often suffer from insufficient generalization due to the fixed traffic patterns and road network conditions used during training. This limitation results in poor adaptability to new traffic scenarios, leading to high retraining costs and complex deployment. To address this challenge, we propose two algorithms: PLight and PRLight. PLight employs a model-based reinforcement learning approach, pretraining control policies and environment models using predefined source-domain traffic scenarios. The environment model predicts the state transitions, which facilitates the comparison of environmental features. PRLight further enhances adaptability by adaptively selecting pre-trained PLight agents based on the similarity between the source and target domains to accelerate the learning process in the target domain. We evaluated the algorithms through two transfer settings: (1) adaptability to different traffic scenarios within the same road network, and (2) generalization across different road networks. The results show that PRLight significantly reduces the adaptation time compared to learning from scratch in new TSC scenarios, achieving optimal performance using similarities between available and target scenarios.
FairDeFace: Evaluating the Fairness and Adversarial Robustness of Face Obfuscation Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The lack of a common platform and benchmark datasets for evaluating face obfuscation methods has been a challenge, with every method being tested using arbitrary experiments, datasets, and metrics. While prior work has demonstrated that face recognition systems exhibit bias against some demographic groups, there exists a substantial gap in our understanding regarding the fairness of face obfuscation methods. Providing fair face obfuscation methods can ensure equitable protection across diverse demographic groups, especially since they can be used to preserve the privacy of vulnerable populations. To address these gaps, this paper introduces a comprehensive framework, named FairDeFace, designed to assess the adversarial robustness and fairness of face obfuscation methods. The framework introduces a set of modules encompassing data benchmarks, face detection and recognition algorithms, adversarial models, utility detection models, and fairness metrics. FairDeFace serves as a versatile platform where any face obfuscation method can be integrated, allowing for rigorous testing and comparison with other state-of-the-art methods. In its current implementation, FairDeFace incorporates 6 attacks, and several privacy, utility and fairness metrics. Using FairDeFace, and by conducting more than 500 experiments, we evaluated and compared the adversarial robustness of seven face obfuscation methods. This extensive analysis led to many interesting findings both in terms of the degree of robustness of existing methods and their biases against some gender or racial groups. FairDeFace also uses visualization of focused areas for both obfuscation and verification attacks to show not only which areas are mostly changed in the obfuscation process for some demographics, but also why they failed through focus area comparison of obfuscation and verification.
Combining Local Symmetry Exploitation and Reinforcement Learning for Optimised Probabilistic Inference -- A Work In Progress
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Efficient probabilistic inference by variable elimination in graphical models requires an optimal elimination order. However, finding an optimal order is a challenging combinatorial optimisation problem for models with a large number of random variables. Most recently, a reinforcement learning approach has been proposed to find efficient contraction orders in tensor networks. Due to the duality between graphical models and tensor networks, we adapt this approach to probabilistic inference in graphical models. Furthermore, we incorporate structure exploitation into the process of finding an optimal order. Currently, the agent's cost function is formulated in terms of intermediate result sizes which are exponential in the number of indices (i.e., random variables). We show that leveraging specific structures during inference allows for introducing compact encodings of intermediate results which can be significantly smaller. By considering the compact encoding sizes for the cost function instead, we enable the agent to explore more efficient contraction orders. The structure we consider in this work is the presence of local symmetries (i.e., symmetries within a model's factors).
An Iterative, User-Centered Design of a Clinical Decision Support System for Critical Care Assessments: Co-Design Sessions with ICU Clinical Providers
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

This study reports the findings of qualitative interview sessions conducted with ICU clinicians for the co-design of a system user interface of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven clinical decision support (CDS) system. This system integrates medical record data with wearable sensor, video, and environmental data into a real-time dynamic model that quantifies patients' risk of clinical decompensation and risk of developing delirium, providing actionable alerts to augment clinical decision-making in the ICU setting. Co-design sessions were conducted as semi-structured focus groups and interviews with ICU clinicians, including physicians, mid-level practitioners, and nurses. Study participants were asked about their perceptions on AI-CDS systems, their system preferences, and were asked to provide feedback on the current user interface prototype. Session transcripts were qualitatively analyzed to identify key themes related to system utility, interface design features, alert preferences, and implementation considerations. Ten clinicians participated in eight sessions. The analysis identified five themes: (1) AI's computational utility, (2) workflow optimization, (3) effects on patient care, (4) technical considerations, and (5) implementation considerations. Clinicians valued the CDS system's multi-modal continuous monitoring and AI's capacity to process large volumes of data in real-time to identify patient risk factors and suggest action items. Participants underscored the system's unique value in detecting delirium and promoting non-pharmacological delirium prevention measures. The actionability and intuitive interpretation of the presented information was emphasized. ICU clinicians recognize the potential of an AI-driven CDS system for ICU delirium and acuity to improve patient outcomes and clinical workflows.
Cross-Examiner: Evaluating Consistency of Large Language Model-Generated Explanations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often asked to explain their outputs to enhance accuracy and transparency. However, evidence suggests that these explanations can misrepresent the models' true reasoning processes. One effective way to identify inaccuracies or omissions in these explanations is through consistency checking, which typically involves asking follow-up questions. This paper introduces, cross-examiner, a new method for generating follow-up questions based on a model's explanation of an initial question. Our method combines symbolic information extraction with language model-driven question generation, resulting in better follow-up questions than those produced by LLMs alone. Additionally, this approach is more flexible than other methods and can generate a wider variety of follow-up questions.
On Deleting Vertices to Reduce Density in Graphs and Supermodular Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2025
Year: 2025

We consider deletion problems in graphs and supermodular functions where the goal is to reduce density. In Graph Density Deletion (GraphDD), we are given a graph $G=(V,E)$ with non-negative vertex costs and a non-negative parameter $ρ\ge 0$ and the goal is to remove a minimum cost subset $S$ of vertices such that the densest subgraph in $G-S$ has density at most $ρ$. This problem has an underlying matroidal structure and generalizes several classical problems such as vertex cover, feedback vertex set, and pseudoforest deletion set for appropriately chosen $ρ\le 1$ and all of these classical problems admit a $2$-approximation. In sharp contrast, we prove that for every fixed integer $ρ> 1$, GraphDD is hard to approximate to within a logarithmic factor via a reduction from Set Cover, thus showing a phase transition phenomenon. Next, we investigate a generalization of GraphDD to monotone supermodular functions, termed Supermodular Density Deletion (SupmodDD). In SupmodDD, we are given a monotone supermodular function $f:2^V \rightarrow \mathbb{Z}_{\ge 0}$ via an evaluation oracle with element costs and a non-negative integer $ρ\ge 0$ and the goal is remove a minimum cost subset $S \subseteq V$ such that the densest subset according to $f$ in $V-S$ has density at most $ρ$. We show that SupmodDD is approximation equivalent to the well-known Submodular Cover problem; this implies a tight logarithmic approximation and hardness for SupmodDD; it also implies a logarithmic approximation for GraphDD, thus matching our inapproximability bound. Motivated by these hardness results, we design bicriteria approximation algorithms for both GraphDD and SupmodDD.
A Critical Analysis of the Usage of Dimensionality Reduction in Four Domains
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Dimensionality reduction is used as an important tool for unraveling the complexities of high-dimensional datasets in many fields of science, such as cell biology, chemical informatics, and physics. Visualizations of the dimensionally reduced data enable scientists to delve into the intrinsic structures of their datasets and align them with established hypotheses. Visualization researchers have thus proposed many dimensionality reduction methods and interactive systems designed to uncover latent structures. At the same time, different scientific domains have formulated guidelines or common workflows for using dimensionality reduction techniques and visualizations for their respective fields. In this work, we present a critical analysis of the usage of dimensionality reduction in scientific domains outside of computer science. First, we conduct a bibliometric analysis of 21,249 academic publications that use dimensionality reduction to observe differences in the frequency of techniques across fields. Next, we conduct a survey of a 71-paper sample from four fields: biology, chemistry, physics, and business. Through this survey, we uncover common workflows, processes, and usage patterns, including the mixed use of confirmatory data analysis to validate a dataset and projection method and exploratory data analysis to then generate more hypotheses. We also find that misinterpretations and inappropriate usage is common, particularly in the visual interpretation of the resulting dimensionally reduced view. Lastly, we compare our observations with recent works in the visualization community in order to match work within our community to potential areas of impact outside our community.